Of of the most significant challenges for PMO leaders is managing relationships across the organization. And as the PMO’s role becomes more and more central to all elements of corporate planning and project delivery, politics inevitably come into play. How do we manage that minefield?

Upcoming Webinars

Building on the very successful webinar “Integrating Agile Techniques into Traditional Projects” (https://www.projectmanagement.com/videos/508012/--Integrating-Agile-Techniques-into-Traditional-Projects-?authenticated=1) Lynda Carter and Dave Davis will present creating visual and interactive communications to convey status and allow for feedback from your audience. We will focus on low tech/high touch means to tell a story and allow for stakeholder feedback. By having all team members contribute to the chart and take ownership of its content – everybody will have a better understanding of their purpose in contributing to the project benefits. The charts that will be discussed include:
• The Project Vision Chart
• A Value Map Canvas
• A Storyboard Map
• Risk Charts
• Others
The PMO challenge is to relay knowledge in a relevant, easily consumed, and highly visual manner. Whether the need is to portray velocity in an agile environment, project schedule via a Gantt chart, or Risk Impact via a Probability Chart, the demand for graphical presentation is never ending. This presentation will focus on creating Interactive/Visual Communications for your project. It doesn’t matter where your project fits on the Predictive/Agile continuum – the opportunity is there for using visual control charts to communicate with all the stakeholders.
This webinar is for all project types at any stage of the project. It’s relevant, it’s practical, and most of all it’s delivered by practitioners for practitioners. Let’s take hybrid to a new level and exchange ideas on visual/interactive communication.

Advance Your Career

In this seminar, Dr. Reich will first discuss two practices which can position a project to deliver value: Design Thinking and Benefits Mapping. Then she will review findings from a large scale study done to compare predictive and agile methodologies. An unexpected and interesting finding is that combining predictive and agile practices into a hybrid approach can produce good outcomes.

Project managers face two competing imperatives, 1) to be as fast and efficient as possible, and 2) to improve what you do and how you do it. The first one is about being on budget, on time and on target. The second one is about doing that better than you did it last time, perhaps radically better. In other words innovating the products you develop and the processes you use to do that. In this webinar you will learn a simple intuitive framework—a mindset—for thinking about your work, that enables that innovation. A switch that will make you and your team more adaptive, resilient and resourceful, as you enhance rather than compromise your efficiency.

Save Time With Tools + Templates

Behind every successful project is a rock-solid, detailed project plan. This template defines every aspect of your project. The final product can be used to make what you are doing clear to all project stakeholders.

This document is a checklist for assessment of whether a project plan meets an acceptable standard. This standard will vary from company to company, so feel free to tailor this form accordingly to meet your needs.

Remember the last project management basics course you attended? The instructor probably talked about the importance of the project plan and that by doing "proper" planning on your project the project will be successful. The plan becomes the silver bullet and if you manage to it, the project will be fine. While great in theory, there are many of us who are finding the traditional approach to project management just simply does not work for us anymore on some of our more dynamic projects. Our projects seem to be in constant flux, always changing, often requiring frequent changes in direction as the end goal of the project is moved, our stakeholders change and we are required to shift our project management approach. The notion of "on-time, on-buget, on-scope" seems to be more of a myth than reality and the idea of being able to plan the whole project at the beginning and sticking close to our project plan is long dead. Join us in our next Change HEADWAY webinar where will be examining the concept of extreme project management and exploring some of the opportunities this project management approach presents and the pitfalls we should avoid.

While there are some subtle differences in closing a project with a party or a wake, a carefully defined checklist will help with either ending to the project. This checklist should be defined early on in the project and communicated to everyone who will have input into the checklist at the end of the project.

Learn From Others

Failure to learn from mistakes--and from each other--can cost organizations dearly. Learning and adapting are hallmarks of good project management and of functioning organizations. Making mistakes is not a problem--it's how we learn.

A few recent events have left this project manager feeling very positive about PMOs--and that’s something that hasn’t happened in quite some time. While we can't yet proclaim PMOs as saviors of organizations, they are now on the journey to success.

Although project managers are often called upon to begin a project immediately, it is important to stop and think critically about the project before getting started. By integrating relevant knowledge before beginning a project you can save time during execution and will have a more complete view to help develop adequate and necessary structure, tools, techniques and guidance to ensure project and organizational success.

Randy Iliff presented the 3 Secrets to Successfully Managing Product Development Programs webinar to the ProjectManagement.com community and provided three secrets to successfully manage product development programs. Randy provided a wealth of information in his presentation. We were not able to get to all of the questions during the live session, but we have included them here.

Application integration is the process of exchanging data between two or more business/application systems. Integration between software applications presents a unique set of challenges. The author describes seven best practices that can be applied to any integration effort, large or small, to improve delivery results.

Why did PMI make Project Integration Management the first knowledge area instead of the last? Doesn’t integration happen when everything else is complete? Read on while we continue our series that shows why getting in physical shape is much like getting ready to write the PMP/CAPM exam...

Using continuous testing, one can immediately detect problems in code — before it’s too late and problems spread. Using a clever combination of tests, tools, and techniques you can tell right away when there’s a problem and it’s easiest to fix. The author uses a case study to illustrate the benefits of continuous integration (CI) and how it leads to better quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA).

The project manager needs to make sure that integration management is not skipped while all of the other project work is going on. When thinking about how you are going to integrate everything together, the following themes are important to keep in mind.

Custom software development is notoriously difficult to estimate. We start with vague ideas of what we want, expecting to fill in the details later. We’re usually doing something a little different than what we’ve done before, or completely different. How can we act more productively?